Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 72

POV: Adeline

There was no time to rest.

The sun had barely begun its descent when the horns sounded again—that same mournful wail that had shattered the dawn, now cutting through the exhausted silence of a pack still bandaging its wounds.

I was helping Elara wrap a young wolf's broken ribs when the sound reached us. Her hands stilled. The young wolf—barely more than a pup, really, maybe seventeen—went pale.

"Already?" he whispered.

I squeezed his shoulder. "Stay here. Protect the healing quarters."

Then I was running.

The second wave hit at dusk, when the light was uncertain and shadows played tricks on tired eyes. Ironclaw had learned from the morning's assault. They came in tighter formations this time, harder to break apart, their attacks focused on specific weak points in our defensive lines.

They had studied us. Watched how we fought. Adapted.

The battle rejoined with a violence that made the morning seem almost gentle.

I fought near the eastern flank, where the trees grew dense and fighting happened in close quarters. My daggers were useless here—too little room to maneuver—so I stayed shifted, my wolf's smaller size an advantage in the cramped spaces between trunks.

Wolves fell around me.

Not just enemies. Ours.

Nadia—the scout who had taught me the patrol routes, who laughed too loudly at dinner and kept wildflowers in her cabin—went down under three Ironclaw wolves. By the time I reached her, she was already still.

Jonah—Marcus's second, who had watched me with suspicion that first day and only last week admitted I wasn't so bad—took a claw across the throat defending a younger packmate. His blood sprayed hot across my fur.

Names I knew. Faces I had learned over weeks of shared meals and training sessions and quiet moments that had stitched me into this pack without my permission.

They were dying.

For a moment—just a moment—the grief threatened to swallow me. To pull me back into that frozen place where loss was too heavy to carry, where the only option was to stop fighting and let the darkness take me too.

No. My wolf's voice cracked like a whip. They died fighting. Honor them the same way.

I drove forward.

The battle became a blur of teeth and claws and desperate, brutal survival. I stopped thinking about technique, stopped calculating angles and openings. I simply fought—for the wolves who had fallen, for the ones still standing, for the pack that had given me shelter when I had nothing left.

For him.

Somewhere across the battlefield, I could feel Aiden through the bond. Not his exact location, but his presence—a burning star in my chest, fierce and focused and very much alive. He was fighting too. Leading. Protecting. Doing what Alphas did when their packs faced annihilation.

I clung to that warmth between kills.

The dusk deepened. The fighting continued. Bodies piled at the edges of the clearing, and the mud ran red, and still the Ironclaw wolves kept coming. Every time we drove one group back, another appeared from the shadows.

Then—a break in the chaos.

I had just finished off an Ironclaw wolf twice my size when I felt eyes on me. Not enemy attention—something else. Something familiar.

I looked up.

Across the churned battlefield, through the haze of blood and exhaustion, Aiden's wolf stood atop a fallen log. He was surrounded by evidence of his own battles—dead enemies scattered around him, wounds marking his dark fur in patterns I would tend later if we survived.

His black eyes found mine.

Stay alive, they said. Clear as words, despite the distance.

I held his gaze for one heartbeat. Two.

You too, I answered with everything I had.

Then we both turned back to the fight.

The second wave broke as full darkness fell.

Once again, the retreat signal echoed through Ironclaw's ranks. Once again, they melted back into the trees with that eerie discipline, leaving their dead behind without ceremony.

But this time, the victory felt hollow.

I shifted back to human form and immediately had to catch myself against a tree. Everything hurt. The wounds from the morning had reopened, and new ones had joined them. My vision swam.

"Adeline." Freya appeared at my side, as battered as I was, pressing a waterskin into my hands. "Drink. You look like death warmed over."

"Feel like it too." I drank deeply, the water cutting through the copper taste that coated my mouth. "Casualties?"

Her face tightened. "Still counting. It's... it's bad."

I closed my eyes. Nadia's laugh echoed in my memory. Jonah's grudging respect, offered like a gift.

"How many more waves?" I asked no one in particular.

Freya didn't answer. We both knew the truth. Ironclaw hadn't committed this many wolves—hadn't launched this coordinated an assault—for a single day's battle. This was a siege tactic. Wear us down. Exhaust our fighters. Thin our numbers.

Then strike the killing blow.

Aiden found me as the pack began the grim work of collecting our dead.

He was human again, dressed in hastily pulled-on clothes, a makeshift bandage wrapped around his forearm. His face was drawn with exhaustion and grief I recognized intimately—the weight of every lost packmate settling onto his shoulders like stones.

"Fourteen," he said quietly. "Fourteen dead. Thirty-two wounded, eight critically."

I wanted to say something comforting. Something that would ease that terrible weight.

Instead, I just stepped forward and pressed my forehead against his chest. His arms came around me immediately, tight enough to hurt, tight enough to anchor us both to this moment.

"They almost took the pup dens," he murmured against my hair. "If Marcus hadn't redirected the third patrol..."

"But he did. And they held."

"This time."

We stood in silence, holding each other amid the evidence of battle. Somewhere nearby, a wolf was howling—the mourning song, the one sung for packmates lost. Other voices joined it, rising into the night sky, carrying the names of the dead to the Moon Spirit.

"Ironclaw is just beginning," I said. It wasn't a question.

Aiden's arms tightened around me. "Yes. This was a test. They were measuring our response, our strength, our weak points."

"And now they know."

"Now they know."

Another howl joined the mourning song. Then another. The entire pack's grief rising together, united even in sorrow.

"We should join them," I whispered.

"In a moment." His hand came up to cradle the back of my head. "I just need... one moment."

So we stood there, bloody and exhausted and terrified of what the morning would bring, and we held onto each other like the world was ending.

Because maybe it was.